Miki Esparbé: "It is still hard to say openly that you go to the psychologist"

BarcelonaWhile actor and director Pau Roca (Barcelona, 1982) was saying goodbye to Every Brilliant Thing –a monologue he has performed intermittently since 2018, in hundreds of shows–, Miki Esparbé (Manresa, 1983) was taking notes frantically from the stalls. “It is beautiful to see how this play can go through the performer, because the message gets across, whether they do it one way or another. But Pau has done it so many times that he has an impressive stage presence,” explains Esparbé. He will debut on November 4th at the Teatre Borràs, taking the lead in this text by Duncan McMillan that bets everything on a single actor and the audience. Without scenery and with the house lights on at all times, Every Brilliant Thing takes one of the great values of theater to the extreme: the fact that it is a shared and changing experience.

The show—directed by Pau Roca and translated by Adriana Nadal—starts with the character explaining that, when he was seven years old, his mother tasked him with making a list of brilliant things. The protagonist begins to list them and, through this apparently trivial enumeration, will unravel a story of depression and suicide that, against all odds, is very luminous. “It does not trivialize the subject, it does not fall into melodrama, and it does not give a simplistic speech; on the contrary. It is a text that takes risks and uses humor to approach it. In this era we have had to live through of dehumanization, finding a play that appeals so directly to empathy is fundamental,” defends Esparbé. The original play premiered in 2013 in the United Kingdom. Since then, mental health has been gaining visibility spaces and has lost some of its stigmas. Even so, Esparbé emphasizes that “it is still hard to say openly that you go to the psychologist the same way you say you go to the physiotherapist” and that “access to mental health professionals remains a matter of privilege”.

Against the epidemic of isolation

Every Brilliant Thing is Esparbé's first theatrical monologue. “I had never received a proposal in this regard, and when this one arrived, I dived headfirst into it,” the actor explains. “The fact of being alone on stage seems very stimulating to me. What I respect the most is that things might slip away from me. We are dealing with such an unpredictable play that I can only have control up to a point. I have set the bar at trying to be as alert as possible, listening very carefully to others, and being able to gather everything that people offer me,” he says. Although the performance of the production will rest entirely on his shoulders, the audience will participate in the show with small interventions that turn the story into a community experience. “Faced with this epidemic of isolation that we are living through, it is a piece about the power of community, and that is why it has been performed for so many years all over the world with such success,” affirms Esparbé.

The proposal from the production company Sixto Paz to take on this text arrived at the perfect time. “It catches me at a personal moment when I really feel like facing this challenge. I always think that if you don't have time to live, you don't have much to explain, and precisely now that I am 42 years old, I place these sensitive topics in a different place. The range of experiences is greater and the words come from here,” the performer reflects. While he steps into the shoes of this peculiar protagonist, Matar a un oso will premiere on Movistar+, a six-episode series about the death of the bear Cachou in the Aran Valley.

“I try to achieve a balance between doing a show from time to time, its tour, and then audiovisual projects. Sometimes it turns out better, sometimes it turns out worse. Sometimes I lose things along the way that I might not have liked to lose, but I try to adjust as much as possible,” he points out. For the moment, Esparbé will live with Every Brilliant Thing for at least a couple of months, because after finishing the season at the Teatre Borràs, he plans to tour Catalonia. Since it premiered at the Temporada Alta festival in 2018, the show has been seen at the Club Capitol, La Villarroel, and Espai Brossa.